An information technology (IT) service is composed of a set of hardware and software artifacts deployed in one or more data centers. Availability and performance of such artifacts vary greatly over time. For example, changes can range from reconfiguration of service attributes to upgrade and downgrade, as well as migration, scale out, etc. Typically, these changes are accomplished manually, resulting in unsatisfactory repeatability, speed of execution, cost efficiency, etc.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a framework for service support. A configuration management is an example of the service support. The configuration management refers to a process for recognizing a configuration item targeted for IT service management to keep, update, confirm, and audit information about the configuration item. The configuration item represents resources targeted for configuration. The configuration item includes not only system resources inclusive of hardware and software but also facilities necessary for providing an IT service, documents such as a description about how to provide IT services, an operating procedure, and a diagram, hardware or software maintenance services, processes, etc.
Some systems provide for IT systems monitoring, but IT systems modeling is less advanced. The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) attempts to capture IT service model instances. However, the CMDB typically is used to store the output of monitoring systems to capture the state of the IT service “as is” in the data center. In other cases, the CMDB is used to store model instances that represent only what the desired IT service should look like.